Health risk of low-dose ionizing radiation
Large radiation doses clearly cause cancer, but the risk from doses comparable to a few CT scans is too small to measure directly. Whether risk stays proportional to dose all the way down is disputed.
Why it matters
The assumption chosen sets radiation protection limits, medical imaging practice and the cost of nuclear operations worldwide.
Review
Brenner et al., Cancer risks attributable to low doses of ionizing radiation: assessing what we really know, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2003. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2235592100 reference checked
Timestamp record
- Signed record
- 1948d946218d…
- Public log
- Entry 274, in checkpoint 2,123
- In the log by
- Block 969,698, 2026-10-03
This text was in the PubPhys log by that date. The date says nothing about when the problem was first posed.